Leslie,
This isn't bad for a first cast drawing, while trying to learn to manipulate the charcoal medium as well. You selected a very complicated cast to draw. (I'm unable to tell from your notes whether you actually drew "from life" -- that is, whether you had the cast in front of you -- or whether this is from a photograph. If the latter, then that would explain some of the difficulties with value massing.)
It may be of interest to know that even the academy student would begin with a much simpler, less detailed cast, on which the value masses tended to "group" naturally in fairly large, distinct areas. In my own practice, I tried in my initial drawing to assign to the entirety of each of those value shapes a single value, chosen from a range of only five values, running from white to black. Even in the beard area, you want to think of it as a form, rather than "hairs" (or "whiskers") and be very broad in laying in the
form-defining, rather than
hair-defining, shapes. Later, you can go back into those larger value shapes and pull out some variations that still lie within that narrow value range. Even on a fairly complex cast, you'll find that values trump detail. As an example, look how much of
the beard in the cast drawing in this Classical Drawing thread is without detail, in both the dark and light extremes where form was more important than detail.
The only other thing I'll mention for now is that you have the cast shadow (a bit confusing -- I mean the shadow being cast by the sculpture, not the body shadow on the sculpture) on the same side of the sculpture as the light source. Perhaps you weren't really thinking of that dark form as a shadow, but rather merely as background, but even background has to be consistent with the overall lighting and value scheme.
Good first effort. You'll be surprised at how quickly the next drawings improve as you begin to train your head to look for things and your eye to find ("see") them.